It’s time again to have a pause and reflect on everything, especially my latest intervention as well as where everything is going. On the one hand I am very happy with all that is progressing but also feeling a little tense about how this aligns with the needs of the course on a more practical level.
The problem with trying to get people to talk about porn in general is of course that it’s both taboo and private. Parents, especially around other parents, are often very self conscious of being judged and opening up to much about their private lives with their immediate community. Understandable. This is however tricky to navigate when there is also a high demand from parents to have support in this area, just like many aspects of parenting it can bring up a lot of your own “stuff” and this can be hard emotional work to do. Generally I find those who participate are happy and grateful to do so. Whilst the project is trying to engage those who need and want to have such vital conversation at the same time “you can lead a horse to water” and all that jazz. As ever it’s overwhelmingly mothers who engage in this work and despite my best efforts dads just aren’t as forthcoming. Again this is ok, a shame, but ok. Obviously some of this could be due also to the fact I am a woman/mother and that men need a male facilitator. Equally I don’t know that mothers/women would be happy to do this work with me if I were a man.
It’s also interesting to see how age plays into some of the other roadblocks along this journey. In the last few months the generational divide (exacerbated by technology and digital literacy or lack there of) is something I have been thinking about a lot. If we had another year of MAAI perhaps I would go down a route of exploring how to tackle this more but both time and frankly a lack of interest on my part to focus on things like social media are reasons I am not. Although I know if started some basic understanding social media based courses for parents there would be a very positive response. Equally the issue of sex work as work and all the nuanced discourse that comes with it is something that goes hand in hand with conversations around pornography but that is something else entirely. Sex workers themselves would need to be involved and it’s an incredibly divisive subject that I am coming to learn is very fractured by the generational divide also. I don’t have the experience, knowledge, time or resources at this juncture to move the project in this direction and there are already great collectives doing this work well.
However, what this insight into generational differences has afforded me is an opportunity to see Gen Z / Zennial people as a key ingredient to bridging the two different worlds of Gen X / Millenial parents and their Gen Alpha kids. These parents not being digital natives leaves them often with no vocabulary (literally and metaphorically) and very little context of experience to understand the world in which their digital native kids inhabit. Arguments about screen time and fear of social media in the home are common place and highlight this clearly. What has evolved in the life of the project is that mostly young artists have responded to the call for the exhibition and are exploring these themes in their work. Just as I have found some possible stakeholders, like Brighton’s Feminist Bookshop, is that ‘older’ people are far more reluctant to express a strong opinion, especially if it means disclosing a stance on sex work or porn more generally for fear of being on the “wrong side” of the conversation or perhaps feeling their true opinions are viewed as outdated in todays climate. But happily I was already asking myself how what role this middle generation could play in unlocking the discourse when they showed up for the project without me really having to ask them to directly. On more personal level it’s refreshing to have such open discourse with people happy to have it rather than them looking to me to perhaps provide answers as with some of the parents. As I use the project to try and open up the conversation to a broader audience adding this age demographic as a stakeholder has given me lots of new insight to further consider and shows me the project at large has more applications than I initially expected. When the aim of the game is to get people to consider cultural relationships with porn then including this generation means more open and honest discourse and reflection and therefore more potential to change the negative aftermath of online gonzo porn, ultimately deconstructing it’s role in sexual violence and rape culture whilst supporting smaller ethical, feminist, equality and pleasure driven porn platforms.